Re: Mutt loses mail
Quoting John Goerzen (jgoerzen@complete.org):
> I would consider, based solely on prima facie appearances, that mutt
> has some serious design flaw with its locking.
[snip description of problem: mutt isn't seeing new messages.]
This doesn't sound like a problem with locking. A dotlock only exists
for the period of time that a message is being delivered, as an
indication that the mbox is being modified. What you're describing is a
sucessful mail delivery: the incoming mail is written to the mbox and
then (I assume) the dotlock is properly removed. (Is there a file
username.lock? If not, the locking phase of mail delivery is over.) But
mutt never detects that the mail is delivered.
It's been a while since I looked at the mutt code, but IIRC it detects
new mail by seeing if the mtime on the mailbox has changed. You said in
your bug that you did an ls -l on the mail server. Did you also see if
that time agreed with the time on the machine where you're reading the
mail? I've seen problems with atime not being carried properly accross
linux NFS; it's possible that there are problems with NFS mtime in the
latest kernels. One thing to try: do you have "nolock" as an NFS mount
option? That disables lockd, which has had problems and which can cause
oddities with servers running older kernels.
Mike Stone
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